The Queen’s Soprano

The first person to look inside my heart, to really see me, was a monk. He came to teach me how to play the harpsichord, and when he heard my voice rise above the chords, he put his hands over his face and ­wept.
 
           I was eleven. Chubbier then. My hair was covered in a white scarf, and the gray smock I wore chafed my breasts. My mother and Father Zachary, the priest who acted as my patron, were drinking coffee in the garden. Father Zachary always waited while the tutors he had hired gave me music ­lessons.
 
           When I saw the monk wipe the tears from his round face, I stopped singing. My heart pounded and my cheeks burned. Resting my hands in my lap, I spoke softly. “My song displeases ­you?”
 
           The monk raised his watery eyes, then brushed his cheek with the sleeve of his brown robe. “Dangerous,” he whispered, his eyelids ­closing.
 
           “What is dangerous?” I ­asked.
 
           “Your voice.” He spoke with closed eyes. “You are a child . . . but you sing with a woman’s voice. It’s unsettling . . . ­disturbing.”
 
           I shook my head; I didn’t ­understand.
 
           He was nervous. His lips trembled, and sweat glistened above his thick brow. “Music awakens the passions . . . stirs feelings . . .” He stared at his hands, lying still on the harpsichord keys. “Excuse me. But I have never heard a voice like yours. You sing with such joy, it moves me deeply. I cannot stay ­here.”
 
           With that, he stood and stepped quickly across the room and out the door. He did not ask Father Zachary to pay him, and he did not say good­-­bye.
 
           I have forgotten his name, but I remember his words, for they settled inside me like a deep sigh. As a young child, I sang before I could speak, humming the melodies I heard in church. By the age of five, I dreamed of music while I slept, and when waking in the morning, I would sing the songs that had filled my dreams. I took to instruments naturally—the guitar and harpsichord—knowing how to play them by touch and sound. Father Zachary brought tutors from the Jesuit College to teach me the theories and practice of music. We always began with scales and vocal exercises. Then I would sing whatever they put before me—psalms, motets, arias—as if each melody had been born inside my own heart. When I finished their lessons, they shook their heads, refusing to return. They claimed their years of training had been wasted, that already I’d surpassed them in ­skill.
 
           All my life, others had told me my talent was a gift from God. But as I grew older, I felt my own power reveal itself in song. I did not speak of this feeling. I didn’t dare. Yet music was as much a part of me as the air I breathed. It lived in my bones, my blood, my heart. No matter what I was doing—sweeping the floor, pulling water from the well, chopping onions—songs rose through me. I tried to rest my voice, as Mother commanded. I learned to hold a song inside my thoughts, swaying silently. But lately, with so many songs bursting inside me, I’d grown tired of living by Mother’s strict ­rules.
 
           No, I was not the daughter my mother thought me to be . . . wished me to be. I lacked obedience. And obedience, as Mother reminded me daily, was a girl’s most valued ­quality.
 
           Mother had many theories. About daughters, about marriage, about husbands. Only part of me still ­listened.
 
           I was not like my sister, Bianca. She was obedient. She listened. She had the sturdiness of an iron plate, reflecting whatever stood above ­it.
 
           Nor was I hardworking like my brother Franco, who spent his days beside Papa making windows for the most beautiful churches and palaces in Rome. I neglected my chores, preferring music to ­mending.
 
           And I certainly wasn’t sweet like my nine­-­year­-­old brother, Pietro. He’d been born with a deformed chin, a cliff of flesh and bone, made worse by the thrust of his bottom teeth. He hid his chin in public, trying to avoid the taunts of our neighbors who called his chin the devil’s work, crossing the street to avoid him, calling out, “Hee­-­haw, hee­-­haw . . . it’s the donkey boy.” Often as we walked to and from church, Pietro took my hand and held it, as if by squeezing my fingers, he might soak up some of my good ­fortune.
 
           And I was not patient like Papa. Good, kind Papa. He was shy with me, his eldest child. He called me his angel but watched me from a distance, as if he knew my talent would take me far away from him ­someday.
 
           I loved my family, but I learned nothing of myself from them. If my family looked inward, they never spoke of their feelings. They spoke of the grape crop, the new priest who stuttered, the barber’s wife whose body was barren. Mother and Papa spoke of my father’s earnings, the nobles and bishops who failed to pay him. We spoke endlessly of food: Why is the soup watery? How tough, this mutton . . . how salty, these ­beans.
 
          And we prayed. We prayed before the Virgin Mary on our wall. Sometimes I felt her eyes watching me, the left one chipped so that she always looked as if she were winking, telling me not to be afraid, to sing louder, to lift my voice to ­God.
 
           For sixteen years, Mother had kept my sister and me enclosed in the house and courtyard, except for our frequent visits to church, and even then Mother made sure our faces were hidden, our cloaks pulled tight, always reminding us, “A gentleman prefers a modest ­wife.”
            On the morning of my seventeenth birthday, I woke to the sounds of chickens clucking, wooden wheels creaking on the cobbled street, the barber’s wife weeping in the courtyard. I lay in bed listening to my sister’s prayers as she knelt beneath the Virgin Mary, and my father’s loud boots clomping below as he got ready to leave for church, which he and my brothers attended every morning on their way to the ­workshop.
 
           Everything the same. Except for me. I wanted my life to be changed on this day. . . . I wanted to raise my voice beyond this house, this neighborhood, to sing in the grand palaces across the ­river!
 
           I hurried downstairs, to find an orange, a chocolate, and a pair of leather shoes with shiny buckles waiting for me on the table. Papa lifted me off the floor with his hug. “Happy birthday, ­Angelica.”
 
           “Grazie, Papa.” I tried on my new shoes with the square toes, the same gift I received every year. “Where do you go today, Papa . . . a church or a palace?” I always asked, I always wanted to hear about the palaces across the ­river.
 
           “Palazzo Riario . . . Queen Christina’s palace,” my brother Franco told me. “The queen wants a glass house built over her garden shed, so her gardener can grow flowers in ­winter.”
 
           “Your brother’s feet should move as fast his mouth.” Papa pulled on his coat. “Come, Franco. You, too, Pietro. The church bells are already ­ringing!”
 
           Pietro jumped from the loft above the fireplace, planted a kiss on my cheek, then rushed after them. But as Papa opened the door and stepped outside, mud poured across the ­door-way.
 
           “Gesummaria!” Mother pushed my brothers into the rain and bolted the door behind them. “By your talents, Angelica, I hope one day we’ll leave this ­neighborhood.”
 
           Our house stood in a small alley off the Piazza Santa Cecilia, in the quarter known as Trastevere. Here, the narrow winding streets were lined with workshops where glassmakers, wood­-­carvers, and stonecutters plied their trades. Even though this side of the river often flooded, Papa said we were lucky. Our house had a courtyard in the back, with a small well and a garden we shared with our ­neighbors.
 
           As I sat drinking a cup of watery coffee and eating a slice of bread, I could hear the tradesmen on their way to work, calling out to me, “Sing a song for us, ­Signorina.”
 
           I stood quickly before the tall mirror that rested against the wall—a gift from Father Zachary so that I could watch my movements as I sang. Every day Mother advised me to hold my eyes open and avoid nervous habits. “Do not sway too much, and make sure your hands do not clutch your smock or dig into your ­pockets.”
 
           But music blinded me. As my voice rose, I saw nothing of myself in the mirror. I saw grief, joy, jealousy—whatever feeling existed in the words of the song. I learned more by ear than by formal training, and I never tired of practicing the music I heard in church, especially the solos sung by the castrati—those male singers who had been castrated as boys so that their voices would maintain the power and purity of the high notes. These days, whenever an oratorio was posted outside the church, Mother made sure we attended. I learned much from listening to the sacred music and poetry, performed free to the ­public.
Copyright © 2006 by Carol Dines
 
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